Texas Instruments’ Engibous bows out

Last week I made a trip to Dallas to interview Texas Instruments Chairman Tom Engibous, who will retire after Thursday’s annual shareholders meeting.

Brandon Wade/For the Chronicle

Tom Engibous

I started covering TI as a defense industry reporter for the Dallas Times Herald in the early 1990s, and in 1996, as a reporter for Bloomberg, I covered the press conference where Engibous was named CEO.

TI was a different company then, a plodding defense contractor that couldn’t figure out how to make money. One of its few profit centers was its legal department, which collected royalties — usually by suing rival chip makers — from the company’s patents on the integrated circuit.

Engibous changed all that. He sold off the defense business, the memory chip operations, laptops and other divisions. He focused the company on the emerging market for digital signal processors, the central chips in cell phones and now most other electronic gadgets.

TI’s DSP technology, by the way, was developed at its plant in the Houston suburb of Stafford. The Stafford plant was home to a band of rebel engineers who, as Engibous put it, “had a bit of disdain for the corporate culture in Dallas.” Now, many of those rebels are in top management positions. That includes Rich Templeton, the current CEO who will succeed Engibous’ as chairman.

These days, TI is exploring uses for DSPs in everything from medical devices to energy conservation equipment. The market that once seemed like such as gamble is now more than $20 billion worldwide.